But a new map published Wednesday by a cybersecurity researcher reveals Flock’s nationwide reach is even bigger. Based on location coordinates from Flock’s own database, the map shows more than 170,000 cameras, plus more than 130,000 accompanying gadgets that play a part in the company’s expansive American surveillance network.

Joshua Michael’s Flock Surveillance Map highlights the locations of what he says are 300,000 Flock surveillance devices spread across the country. His findings — which were cited in Wednesday’s Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing on Flock — differ from existing maps of Flock’s automated license plate readers in scope and methodology.

Unlike crowd-sourced projects such as DeFlock, which are built on locations submitted by users, the Flock Surveillance Map relies on location data culled from a snapshot, archived by Michael in December 2025, of Flock’s own records. In addition to cameras, it maps supplemental devices — including 27,000 acoustic detection devices, as well as networking equipment that integrates third-party cameras — to illustrate the scale of Flock’s surveillance web.

“These cameras form a nationwide surveillance network that tracks where everyone drives,” Michael told The Intercept, “so foreign nations don’t need to send spies to harm our country. They can simply watch where our soldiers, federal agents, and politicians go.”

The Intercept visited six random Arizona locations on Michael’s map; each location had a Flock camera present at the indicated coordinates.

The Flock Surveillance Map also color-codes each Flock device according to its model — showing, for instance, whether the device is a Flock camera, known as a Falcon, or an accompanying processing unit known as a Picard. (Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The accompanying searchable dataset table also lists each camera’s individual name, as outlined in Flock’s database, which typically includes a street address and sometimes other identifying characteristics. A camera with the name “FBI Pilot Camera,” for example, is shown to be located at the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI headquarters in Washington.

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The map illustrates Flock’s national spread, but also its clustering in certain areas. For example, 860 Flock devices appear to be concentrated just outside Chicago O’Hare International Airport, at the Rosemont Public Safety Department, which provides police, fire, and emergency medical services in the Chicago suburb.

Numerous Flock cameras appear to be installed inside detention centers. A camera titled “C-F-23 FOXTROT MALE HOLDING 2/SHOWERS” appears at the coordinates of the Silverdale Detention Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In November 2025, Michael discovered a novel way to identify the location of Flock’s devices. Trawling the company’s website, he realized that Flock’s servers were publicly leaking data in the form of an access token that could be acquired without needing to log in. With that token, Michael said he could query ArcGIS, a third-party geographic information system platform used by Flock, to retrieve the locations of Flock devices.

Michael told The Intercept he promptly contacted Flock and described his findings. As Michael wrote in his initial email to Flock on November 13, 2025: “all testing was strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations.” Michael said he didn’t receive a reply, so he followed up with Flock the next day, and a third time several days later.

After his third attempt to inform Flock of the discovered vulnerability, Michael received a reply from a Flock that said, “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon.”

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Michael said he never heard back about it from Flock.

In December 2025, Michael downloaded the Flock device location data, and in January wrote an in-depth technical blog post about what he had found. After Michael’s post, it appears that Flock fixed the vulnerability.

Despite being alerted of Michael’s findings in November 2025, Flock published its own blog post the following January saying it hadn’t had any data breaches. “Flock has never been hacked, and there has not been a leak of Flock information,” the company claimed. “Flock Safety’s cloud platform has never experienced a data breach.”

The Atlanta-based startup has faced mounting criticism for its practices and lack of transparency in recent months. An American Civil Liberties Union report found “a pattern of Flock regularly misleading or even lying about its business practices, safety record, commitment to privacy, and efforts to protect vulnerable populations.”

Michael told The Intercept that Flock’s recent claims about its data security record don’t reflect reality. Flock has publicly claimed multiple times that the company has never experienced a data breach, “and this was after I pulled their database of devices.”

“That leaves two possibilities,” he said. “Either they knew and chose not to disclose it for fear of bad press, or they didn’t know I exfiltrated the data at all. The first is a transparency failure. The second is a detection failure with national security implications.”

On Thursday, Michael was notified that Doppel, which describes itself as an “AI-native social engineering defense platfom,” filed a trademark infringement complaint regarding his site, claiming to be working on Flock’s behalf. Doppel says that the site is using the trademark “FLOCK SAFETY” without authorization, which “may cause customer confusion / harm.” Doppel requested the site be taken down.

When he posted the Flock Surveillance Map, Michael included a pop-up disclaimer saying that the site is “not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock.”

The post Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline appeared first on The Intercept.

At the time, DoorDash’s campaign contributions in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election were considered unusually large — it made a single $1 million gift to a super PAC that, at the time, was the largest donation in the race — and faced criticism from other candidates in the race. The food delivery giant’s settlement agreement, the largest worker settlement in the city’s history, brings further scrutiny to those donations.

Through that election cycle, DoorDash spent around $1.4 million against Mamdani and in favor of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The company was one of the top donors to the biggest outside spender in the election, a virulently anti-Mamdani super PAC called Fix the City. 

While on the campaign trail, Mamdani had promised to regulate delivery apps and further protections for delivery workers, proposals that earned him the support of delivery worker groups.

At the time, DoorDash’s large spending raised eyebrows. Now, the company has to pay its workers around 100 times the amount it spent attempting to influence the election, owing to a mayoral administration that refused to overlook concerns with the company’s conduct.

“It’s not a contribution, it’s an investment, with the donor or investor expecting something in return,” said Greg Coleridge, a former co-director of Move to Amend, an advocacy group that seeks stringent regulations against corporate money in elections. “Here is an instance where organized money from a company that was trying to avoid being responsible and accountable, was unsuccessful.”

Announcing the new settlement, Mamdani said, “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft. But it also shows that enforcement matters.”

In a public statement about the settlement, DoorDash said, “Simply put, we screwed up. Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.” (DoorDash did not respond to a request for comment on its campaign contributions.)

The Smear Campaign Against Mamdani

DoorDash contributed $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC that spent $31 million in the mayoral election, accounting for close to half of the total outside spending in the race, largely funded by big corporations and billionaires. DoorDash made the payment in May 2025, at a time Mamdani’s campaign was gaining significant momentum ahead of the mayoral primaries in June.

Fix the City ran a barrage of ads, phone calls, text messages, and other forms of political communication seeking to prevent a Mamdani victory and portraying him as a politician with “radically dangerous ideas” and “a risk New York can’t afford.”

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The group artificially altered Mamdani’s beard in a campaign mailer and made it appear longer and darker, an act that the Muslim mayoral candidate had called out as “blatant Islamophobia.”

At the end of video ads by Fix The City, a campaign finance disclosure in small text at the bottom of the screen read, “The top three donors to the organization responsible for this advertisement are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, John Hess.”

DoorDash also gave $1.8 million to Local Economies Forward NY, a super PAC that contributed more than $360,000 to Cuomo’s campaign.

Aided by corporations like DoorDash and billionaires like Bloomberg, the overall independent spending by super PACs seeking to defeat Mamdani was more than eight times what was spent in his favor, according to The Intercept’s analysis of data published by the NYC Campaign Finance Board.

A Historic Settlement

DoorDash’s settlement followed an investigation by the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The Mamdani administration said that the investigation “found that DoorDash deliberately paid workers below the Minimum Pay Rate or not at all.” 

Under the settlement with the city, the food delivery giant will pay over $115 million in worker restitution and over $16 million in civil penalties and administrative fines.

Two weeks after assuming office, the Mamdani administration warned delivery apps to comply with worker protections, sending notices to DoorDash and others, and announcing a lawsuit against the delivery app Motoclick.

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The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s citywide investigation into DoorDash began after dozens of workers reported that the company had failed to pay them or had paid them late for work they had performed.

As part of the settlement, DoorDash must submit detailed compliance data reports to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection every month for three years, and the company’ activities will also be monitored through workers sharing data with the city.

The settlement announced by Mamdani is not the first run-in that DoorDash has had in recent years with restitution payments in New York. 

In May 2024, the company agreed to pay $75,000 in a settlement after New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the company routinely rejected applicants with criminal histories in violation of the New York City Fair Chance Act. In February 2025, the attorney general settled with DoorDash for $16.75 million after the company used tips to subsidize workers’ guaranteed pay.

“They knew that by having a mayor who’s willing to put resources [for workers], it’s gonna be detrimental to their corporate model,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, a group that organizes for low-wage immigrant workers and had helped several DoorDash workers file complaints with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. “DoorDash decided to invest money in trying to buy our city’s democracy.”

The post DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why. appeared first on The Intercept.

The group, Neighbors for Strong Communities, asked Ashley Smith to speak out in support of Flock’s controversial license-plate readers. The nonprofit even offered to use artificial intelligence to help her draft an email to public officials.

There was only one catch: Smith, a mother of four, said she noticed that she would only be supplied with text if she indicated she supported the Flock cameras.

Instead of offering support, Smith dashed off her own email — an outraged missive to her elected officials and a local blog outlining what she saw as an insidious PR campaign.

“If the interests beyond this surveillance technology will work this hard to deceive you to win a vote, what will they do with the database of our every movement?” she said. “A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies, audit logs, or the privacy of the people of Knox County.”

The text message to Smith revealed little about the Flock campaign’s origins.

As it turns out, the campaign was the product of a “partnership” between Flock and a newly created nonprofit that has used similar tactics in support of the controversial proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. Opponents of the merger derided the nonprofit’s work there as corporate “astroturf” — the practice of drumming up fake grassroots support.

The combination of texts and AI-generated messages fell short of swaying public officials in Knoxville. Last month, the county commission became the latest municipal body to vote to cancel the Flock contract.

In both the Paramount and Flock cases, however, Neighbors for Strong Communities’s work has raised questions about what counts as truly grassroots organizing.

“One of the concerns of the people with the Flock cameras is: Can we trust you?” Smith told The Intercept. “And this sort of manipulation of people’s desires already shows that they are secretive, and they are not willing to share the honest information.”

Flock and Neighbors for Strong Communities did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, the nonprofit said it had a lead role in the pro-Flock campaign. “Flock Safety brought experience with public safety technology. Neighbors independently designed and managed the resident-engagement campaign, helping Knox County residents share their experiences directly with local decision-makers,” the organization said.

There are, however, no signs of a genuine upswell in grassroots support for Flock, said Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is critical of both the Paramount merger and Flock.

“This is very much an astroturf project. I mean, there are no neighbors and there are no communities,” he said. “What makes it astroturf is the fake grassroots nature of it.”

“You’re talking about literally one of the most unpopular technologies,” Aaron added, “that has people taking chainsaws to light poles because they don’t like being spied on.”

“This Is So Shady”

Neighbors for Strong Communities’s text messages can look like they come from nearby.

The text Smith received about Flock cameras came from a Knoxville area code. In California, residents received text messages about the Paramount merger from a Los Angeles area code.

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In both cases, residents were presented with a series of questions whose answers would, in at least some cases, be used by Neighbors for Strong Communities to draft AI-generated emails to public officials.

Despite the area codes it sent texts from, Neighbors for Strong Communities was incorporated in Washington, D.C., in June.

Although the group does not list a board or staff members on its website’s “About” page, its incorporation papers show that its directors include several political consultants, including at least one former registered lobbyist.

At least two directors at Neighbors for Strong Communities also helped found Influent, a company that uses AI to generate letters to elected officials. Text messages to Knoxville residents linked to a URL with the word “influent” in the address. Whether Influent has a business relationship with Flock is unknown. (Influent did not respond to a request for comment.)

The page on Neighbors for Strong Communities’s website dedicated to Knox County features an image of a man with six fingers — a rare condition that is also a hallmark of AI-generated imagery. The page says Flock’s supporters are “real people.”

Smith said she was confused to receive the text message from Neighbors for Strong Communities, which she had never heard of despite her long involvement in local politics. In its message to her, the group seemed to play up a local connection.

“Knox County Neighbors for Strong Communities is asking local residents to speak up in support of responsible license plate readers with strong privacy protections before the vote on Monday,” the text message said. “Answer 2 quick questions and we’ll help you generate a personalized message urging local leaders to support this practical public safety tool.”

She filled out the form from Neighbors for Strong Communities twice, at first indicating her opposition to license-plate reader cameras, she said. Only on the second attempt, when she pretended that she supported the cameras, was she given the draft of an email to her county commissioners. The draft did not indicate the use of AI or its connection to the nonprofit group.

The experience disturbed Smith, who felt certain that she would have heard of a grassroots group in Knoxville given her years of organizing in local conservative politics.

“This is so shady,” Smith remembered telling herself. “If you’re in opposition, they don’t let you send that to your commissioners. But if you’re in support, they’re sending that to all of the commissioners.”

Smith started digging — and she used artificial intelligence to help. Her searches turned up Neighbors for Strong Communities’s incorporation paperwork in Washington, D.C.

Knox shared her findings with her county commissioner Andy Fox and a popular Facebook page for local politics. She noted that the address the nonprofit provided was shared with an Italian restaurant in D.C. (The group has since updated its address, which it shares with a UPS store in Santa Monica, California.) When the Facebook page shared her findings, at least nine residents posted comments saying they had received text messages, too.

“Clearly a PR Campaign”

Neighbors for Strong Communities’s intervention came at a perilous moment for Flock.

The company had already reaped more than $2 million from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, but county commissioners said they had never been asked to approve a contract.

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Residents on the right and left were raising concerns about privacy protections and the camera network’s history of being used by rogue law enforcement officers to stalk former romantic partners.

The nonprofit’s outreach effort appears to have generated a flurry of emails to commissioners arguing that the cameras were needed to prevent crime. Former at-large Commissioner Larsen Jay shared eight emails that he received from constituents supporting the use of license-plate readers.

None of those emails were identical, but their language was similar enough to raise red flags for Jay, whose service on the commission wrapped up at the end of August.

The emails Jay shared with The Intercept appear to come from genuine residents of the Knoxville area. Two residents confirmed to The Intercept that they had sent emails in support of Flock, although one said she had since switched her position.

While several emails contained personalized details, Jay said he considered the pro-Flock emails to be “form letters” nonetheless. In face-to-face conversations, Jay said, opposition to Flock ran 99-to-1.

“It’s just clearly a PR campaign,” Jay said. “Don’t use my people. That’s how it felt when I started to realize what it was.”

“These Are Real People”

At some point after the pro-Flock campaign came to an end, Neighbors for Strong Communities posted a defense of its tactics on its website.

The group acknowledged that it used “technology” to help residents craft missives to county officials. It said, however, that all of those residents were asked to sign off on the AI-generated drafts.

“Technology played a role in this campaign, but it was never the point,” the group said on its website. “These are real people with real experiences. Whether someone ultimately agrees with every policy position or not, their voices deserve a place in the decisions shaping their community.”

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It remains unclear how the group handled responses from residents who oppose the use of Flock’s cameras. The group said on its website that it “listened” to those responses but did not comment further when asked.

Flock’s partnership with Neighbors for Strong Communities largely flew under the radar until weeks later, when the nonprofit partnered with Paramount Skydance on its proposed merger. Critics of the merger noticed the group’s earlier work in Knoxville and began asking questions about why a nonprofit would work on such disparate campaigns.

Merger critics said the nonprofit’s work in California had all the hallmarks of a phony “astroturf” campaign, which is designed to generate the appearance of grassroots support.

The group drew more negative attention recently, when a merger critic discovered that its AI text generator flipped her criticism of the deal into support. The nonprofit’s spokesperson blamed “a recent system upgrade.”

In Knoxville, Neighbors for Strong Communities appears to have disclosed — at least after the fact — that it “partnered” with Flock on the pro-camera campaign. Still, the group has not disclosed the sources of its funding.

Thomas Lyon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who has studied corporate public relations, said that a campaign can still be classified as “astroturf” even if it generates letters or emails from ordinary citizens. In the pre-AI era, Lyon said, public relations firms running “astroturf” campaigns for corporations would sometimes call people and offer to draft them letters to public officials over the phone.

The company associated with two of Neighbors for Strong Communities’ directors, Influent, promises on its website that it has a different approach from other corporate influence campaigns.

“Generic astroturf form letters are destined for the trash bin,” the company says in promotion materials. “Every Influent letter, Tweet, phone call, and message is tailored to the individual — each one unique, reflecting the authentic voice of its sender.”

Neighbors for Strong Communities’s own website features similar language stressing the authenticity of supporters’ messages to public officials.

By that measure, at least, the nonprofit missed the mark, according to another county commissioner. Andy Fox — Ashley Smith’s representative on the commission — told The Intercept that he received dozens of “template” emails in support of Flock.

He said, “It doesn’t feel right to me.”

The post Facing Outraged Residents, Flock Got Help From Group That Uses AI to Rally Public Support appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a centrist who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, privately urged fellow Democrats to support advancing a crypto bill that would have created a regulatory framework for the industry, according to reporting in Politico.

Her pleas fell on deaf ears, however, as progressives including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., mounted a public campaign against the bill. The critics said the bill would allow President Donald Trump to add to the $1.4 billion in crypto profits he pocketed last year.

When it came time for the final vote, Gillibrand joined all Democrats in voting against a motion to advance the bill. Four Republicans also voted against the motion, which fell far short of the 60 votes needed to proceed to a full debate. The final tally was 49–50.

Gillibrand’s flip-flop reflected the bind that Trump has placed on moderate Democrats during his second term. Many of those centrists previously backed crypto-friendly regulations, but the historic scale of Trump’s profits on his meme coin and other crypto ventures has made them reluctant to publicly side with the industry.

Gillibrand’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the progressive group Demand Progress criticized her for previously trying to rally support for the bill.

“While Sen. Gillibrand switched her support for the bill at the last minute, we deserve to know why she tried to get her colleagues to rubber-stamp this corrupt crypto deal, particularly at a time when she is claiming to oppose Trump’s corruption,” said the group’s corporate power policy adviser, Ella Fanger.

Gillibrand has long been one of the crypto industry’s most outspoken supporters in the Senate. Before the vote, an aide argued in a written statement that it would be best to proceed to debate on the Clarity Act, stating, “Senator Gillibrand would relish the chance to debate real ethics reforms on the floor — in full view of the public, seven weeks out from the midterms.”

Trump and Senate Republicans tried to win over the dozen or so Senate Democrats who have proven friendly to the crypto industry in the past with concessions they said would rein in the president’s crypto ventures.

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In remarks on the Senate floor, one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., highlighted Gillibrand’s role in negotiations over the text as evidence of its bipartisan backing. Lummis also argued that the White House had conceded virtually everything that Democrats had asked for when it came to ethics provisions over the course of months of negotiations.

“President Trump gave more than anyone in this town expected, twice. It is time for this body to take yes for an answer,” she said. “Take the win.”

Warren and others warned that the supposed concessions were shot through with loopholes.

“We need crypto regulation, but voting to proceed to this bill is a vote to bless Donald Trump’s corruption,” Warren said hours before the vote.

One key provision that Democrats had sought would allow state attorneys general to initiate enforcement actions against the president for ethics violations. However, staffers for Warren on the Senate Banking Committee said that the provision included in the latest version of the bill text was essentially a dead letter, because political officials directed by Trump could issue a legal opinion shutting down the enforcement action.

Another provision of the bill allowing Trump to put his crypto assets in a supposedly “blind” trust would not prevent him from favoring the industry to increase his own profits, minority staffers for the Senate Banking Committee said.

Trump’s self-dealing was not the only issue hanging over the legislation. The banking industry also flexed its political muscles on the Hill by arguing that the bill would enable crypto start-ups to steal deposits from small local lenders.

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Tuesday’s vote could create a liability for Democrats heading into the midterms. Crypto industry super PACs have a massive war chest that they could use to target vulnerable Democrats — a tactic they deployed during the 2024 election.

Voters want to know that candidates are willing to defy well-funded industries, Warren argued, pointing to the growing number of candidates who bucked crypto during the primary season and won nonetheless.

“The crypto industry doesn’t want to just lobby Congress, they want to buy the Congress that will be favorable to them,” she said. “It is our job when we run for elected office to stand up and do what’s right.”

The post Crypto Darling Gillibrand’s 11th-Hour Flip-Flop Helps Block Trump Crypto Bill appeared first on The Intercept.

In the last week, a raft of top tech executives — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — joined a chorus of doomsaying voices from Silicon Valley urging a slowdown in artificial intelligence development.

The executives feared, they said, that the tools would become too powerful too soon and pose an existential risk to humanity.

Why would three multibillionaire tech CEOs all come together to agree that the technologies their companies are developing might be too dangerous?

Do the overlords of Silicon Valley really think frontier AI models are likely to “kill all humans,” as one senior employee at Anthropic warned last week? Is this just another example of hype propagated to draw in more investment?

The beneficiaries of the AI gold rush and the beneficiaries of investment in AI safety are, after all, likely to be the very same people, even if AI stocks have fallen in recent days amid the latest doom cycle.

We could waste a lot of time speculating about the apocalyptic or cynical worldviews of tech billionaires. Regardless of what these CEOs and their employees actually believe, however, one thing is clear: Talk of existential risk is a highly convenient way to not address the already known harms produced by AI technologies overseen by fascist billionaires like Musk and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

It’s a suspicious time for Silicon Valley leaders to again offer up millenarian narratives about existential risks beyond our comprehension. The CEOs’ warnings, after all, came at the very moment a cross-political consensus is growing against the proliferation of actually existing harms of AI and its infrastructure. Consider, for example, mass opposition to data centers and classroom AI bans.

Silicon Valley talk about existential risk is hardly new. In 2023, hundreds of tech researchers, CEOs of the major AI companies, investors, and academics signed an open letter on AI risk just one sentence long: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Pitiful international commitments to preventing future pandemics and nuclear wars are hardly a reassuring baseline, but the sentiment of the open letter played into a now typical AI story, thick with theological overtones: A threshold is supposedly approaching, which could lead to the total destruction of life on Earth — or our salvation.

That threshold, according to the figureheads of technocapital, is the birth of AGI: “artificial general intelligence,” or systems of equal or superior intelligence to humans. From that point, these stories go, mighty super intelligent machines would emerge through recursive cycles of AI self-improvement.

Deliverance or Destruction

The destruction wrought by these AI systems could be total, so we are told, if they are not “aligned” with human interests. According to one particularly deranged thought experiment, our future robot overlords could turn everything on Earth into paperclips.

Alternatively, the utopian storyline goes, the magic of AI — and it is described with no more concreteness than gestures to magic — will solve every worldly problem and more, from climate devastation, to poverty, to illness, to mortality itself.

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Consider how tech multibillionaires Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt have brushed off the issue of AI processing’s already ruinous, gargantuan consumption of energy and water use. The New York Times reported that Schmidt believes AI has “too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.”

Advanced AI will bring such growth, such prosperity, such environment-saving technology, such holy deliverance, they say, that only a small-minded technophobe could want to hold back the learning machines in their dizzying progress.

How will super AI do this? I can’t tell you. Crucially, neither can the billionaires and technologists bringing this alleged magic — or terror — to the world. Nor can those directing unprecedented, economy-redefining amounts of capital and energy toward data centers and AI research articulate artificial intelligence’s path to redemption.

The whole point is that those of us at the bottom of the food chain — the consumers, or maybe all of humanity — cannot possibly understand the forces at work here.

We should be skeptical of these propagandistic narratives. This is not to say that the AI industries are not world-changing. AI can already do extraordinary things, many far beyond human capacities; these technologies have already had profound effects on the world of work, on global infrastructure, on the applications of state violence, on the vast flows of capital and energy.

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AI isn’t, after all, one thing: It’s collection of methods based in what’s known as machine learning, which is basically algorithms using statistics to find patterns in massive amounts of data, including in extraordinarily complex ways.

AI products and services abound, from text and image generative content to recommendation engines, like those used by Spotify and Netflix; fraud detection systems; and navigation systems such as Google Maps.

Yes, we’re swimming in AI slop, enshittified search engines, stolen content, deepfakes, embarrassing mistakes, and hallucinations. But there are also scientists using machine learning to revolutionize the detection and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Meanwhile, AI systems are used to generate — and justify — kill lists in a genocide, or generate revenge porn, or populate predictive-policing databases along racist lines.

AI Fairytales

The problem with AI fairytales, which take the development of “artificial general intelligence” as a teleological endpoint, is that the array of machine learning’s current and potential applications are collapsed together as part of a singular unstoppable force.

Instead of a serious reckoning with existing harms and possibilities of technological development, technocapital’s mouthpieces prefer a story of an inevitable Judgment Day: The great thinking machines are coming and will destroy or deliver us.

Pesky questions about the actual capacities and potentials of machine learning are cast away. So, too, are difficult discussions about the dark history of “intelligence” as a calculable quality and a messy, contested concept.

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Genuine uncertainties and unknowns about how best or not to develop and deploy advanced machine learning technologies are obviated — considerations being reserved for the Great Men of Silicon Valley.

As the cognitive scientist Hagen Blix and machine learning researcher Ingeborg Glimmer wrote in their 2025 book “Why We Fear AI”: “If the stakes are as high as the very survival of humanity, then concerns about the effects that really existing artificial intelligence technology has right now—from excessive energy usage, to undermining the livelihood of artists and dock workers, to introducing cybersecurity vulnerabilities, to perpetuating and worsening discrimination, to disinformation and deep fakes, to supercharging mass surveillance, etc., are easily brushed aside.”

The post Tech CEOs’ Doomsaying Is a Distraction from Real, Existing Harms of AI appeared first on The Intercept.

On August 26, the State Department announced far-reaching sanctions against the Italian collective, which provides web-hosting services to a swath of the international far left. The U.S. government categorized A/I, as it’s also known, as a “specially designated global terrorist” and accused it of being an “extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells.”

A/I maintains digital infrastructure utilized by thousands of leftists and left-wing organizations across the globe, including anonymous email accounts and servers powering its NoBlogs.org hosting platform. The designation could force many of the sites offline — threatening much of what the A/I Collective has built.

Two days later, the site came under a different kind of attack. Hackers took aim at the NoBlogs site itself. A cyberattacker gained access to the platform, vandalizing its homepage and potentially accessing internal user data.

For far-right hackers and internet trolls, this was a moment for celebration. Just two minutes after the vandalized homepage was captured by an internet archive, the attack was publicized on X by someone using the handle “AstraRCE” and soon promoted by prominent far-right accounts, including “DataRepublican,” the online moniker of Jennica Pounds.

Until June, Pounds was a member of the Pentagon press corps — famous mostly for trolling the left — but allowed her credentials to expire at the end of the month. In late August, it was revealed that Pounds had been employed by the Pentagon since July, as part of a larger operation launched by the federal government to recruit right-wing influencers into jobs at President Donald Trump’s Department of War.

The relationship between DataRepublican and AstraRCE goes back through several prominent hacks of the left. The pair have a long and involved history of posting to each other about hackers’ exploits online, raising questions about the relationship between a Trump administration employee and an anonymous online personality posting real-time updates on hacks against the left.

DataRepublican and AstraRCE are part of a wider circle with huge followings that are often the first to mention hacks against left-wing digital infrastructure. They publish screenshots, share each other’s posts, offer snide commentary, and congratulate their associates — messages that frequently verge into bestowing credit for the hacks.

The federal government’s support for an influencer who praises domestic hacking efforts would mark a major escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent, said Harlo Holmes, the chief security programs officer at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“It’s the difference between open-source intelligence, that is often used in surveillance, and ever increasingly used in surveillance, and actually jumping into people’s machines,” Holmes said. “That is a line that is always worth noting and ringing the alarm bell when crossed.”

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Though members of the A/I Collective weren’t able to attribute the hack to anyone, the cyberattack would eventually achieve its apparent aim. Beset by the pressure of terrorism sanctions, a hostile cyberattack, and continued scrutiny from the U.S. government, the group announced on September 6 that, after 25 years, it would disband.

“We cannot engage in a fight or expose ourselves to manipulations that threaten the lives of these people and their loved ones, leaving them at the mercy of autocrats, fascists, and agencies that take extra-legal courses of action,” the group wrote in a statement. “The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide.”

Publicizing NoBlogs Hack

DataRepublican frequently publishes reports, visualizations, and data leaks that target leftist groups involved in protests and activism across the country.

Before Pounds’s assignment at the Department of War, DataRepublican regularly posted inside information about hacks, nodding to the involvement of other far-right social media personalities, among them AstraRCE.

DataRepublican and AstraRCE were the first people to publicize the NoBlogs hack online. Taking a celebratory tone, they linked to and replied to one another’s post. In one instance, AstraRCE claimed apparent inside knowledge about the federal government’s possession of internal user data from NoBlogs. DataRepublican confirmed the claim.

AstraRCE’s initial X post about the hack showed a screenshot of the vandalized NoBlogs homepage, which now displayed a message that said, “All user data has been saved and given to the United States government” — alongside an altered banner that read “TRUMPBLOGS.” AstraRCE later offered a mocking congratulations to NoBlogs for its “rebrand.”

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Just four minutes after AstraRCE pointed to the screenshot of the hack, DataRepublican’s X account reposted the image, alongside a caption characterizing NoBlogs as a “platform shared by Antifa and far-left Marxists.”

“The State Department designed them as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group yesterday,” DataRepublican wrote. “And now … they’re TrumpBlogs.”

Later, DataRepublican’s website published a visualization tool that allows users to view thousands of NoBlogs sites dispersed across a map, naming the tool Trumpblogs, in what appears to be a reference to the hack. Shortly after the tool went online, AstraRCE posted on X to say that the trumpblogs.org domain would now be redirecting to DataRepublican’s site.

The Pentagon has thus far declined to reveal what assignment Pounds or other right-wing media influencers have been given, and it’s unknown if activities like producing the visualization tool would be part of these duties. (The Department of War did not reply to a request for comment.)

“They’re hiring people who have a history of sort of dirt digging,” said David Greene, who serves as legal counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And they’re digging for information about their enemies, and both trying to identify their enemies and build dossiers on them.”

Holmes, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that determining responsibility for cyberattacks like the one that targeted NoBlogs can be incredibly difficult, especially for smaller organizations.

“Attribution is really hard to prove definitively,” Holmes said. “But, also, there are a lot of imbalances there because the folks at Autistici don’t necessarily have the ability to perform the type of forensics and response that normally leads to successful attribution, or at least not quickly.”

Partners in Posting

DataRepublican and AstraRCE steer clear in their posts of explicitly claiming responsibility for hacks. They frequently, however, offer kudos to fellow travelers. Sometimes they post claims of insider access to information about the hacks or, in a few cases, show information that reveals access to the hacked systems themselves.

In at least one instance, a post by DataRepublican appeared to take direct responsibility for a cyber operation. Writing on X in July, the DataRepublican account claimed credit for a honey-pot scheme against a Nigerian hacker, which DataRepublican said had gone after right-wing media personality Hugh Hewitt.

“It’s true,” DataRepublican wrote, attaching a screenshot of the hackers’ location and IP address. “@astrarce and I honeypotted the Hugh Hewitt hacker.”

Even though DataRepublican and AstraRCE don’t take credit for cyberattacks, the far-right web heaps praise on them for the exploits.

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Seeking to disrupt a database collecting information on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, a January hack overrode images of license plates with a meme saying, “ALL YOUR LOGINS, LOCATIONS, PASSWORDS, AND PHONE NUMBERS HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO FBI AND ICE.”

After sharing the image and tagging AstraRCE, DataRepublican was asked by an online fan how it happened. The account replied, “I don’t know, but an unrelated tip is that it’s a bad idea to make your encryption/decryption script readable to the world.”

Several X accounts in the right-wing milieu responded to DataRepublican’s initial post with congratulations. A spokesperson for Turning Point USA said, “Well done, patriots.”

In another case, a Fox News article purported to expose the network of organizers behind protests at ICE’s Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Summarizing its report, Fox News credited, among others, DataRepublican and AstraRCE with infiltrating the group: “The activities of this network have motivated a group of tech sleuths on the X — @DataRepublican, @Astrarce, @bitchuneedsoap and @gunshymartyr — to penetrate these groups, their Signal chats and their operations like a digital Avengers squad.”

In February, following a cyberattack on Siembra NC, a North Carolina-based immigrant rights organization, DataRepublican claimed the group operated two active websites responsible for “doxxing ICE.” Citing AstraRCE, DataRepublican suggested hackers had taken over the nonprofit’s notification system.

“Per @astrarce,” DataRepublican wrote, “the 1000+ users signed up to both sites have received a text alert with the meme attached” — a photo of FBI Director Kash Patel with meme text that says, “FEDS HAVE ALL YOUR DATA.”

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DataRepublican then posted what appeared to be a screenshot of the organization’s internal notification dashboard, claiming that more than 2,000 users had received push notifications. The notification text visible on the dashboard suggested users received a message urging self-deportation and claimed their personal information had been sent to federal authorities.

During a similar hack of StopICE.net, an ICE tracking website, DataRepublican claimed to have insider knowledge of data from a hack being sent to the authorities.

“I can personally testify,” DataRepublican posted, “that the names, logins, passwords, locations (down to coordinates), and phone numbers of 100K+ users were all sent to FBI, ICE, HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “and more.”

Like the cyberattack targeting NoBlogs, in other cases DataRepublican and AstraRCE were also quick to celebrate cyberattacks against leftist groups and post screenshots of the incursions. In many of the cases, the webpages of the sites were vandalized and a message was left behind claiming to have accessed and sent internal data to the federal government.

Claiming Inside Info

The NoBlogs hack became one of the instances where DataRepublican and AstraRCE alluded to both having insider information about the provenance of materials from the hack and their transmittal into the hands of the authorities — all while Pounds was firmly ensconced at the Pentagon.

The episode, in the immediate wake of the NoBlogs hack, was telling. AstraRCE echoed the claim made on the vandalized NoBlog homepage: that the federal government was in possession of the site’s internal user data.

The episode was set off when the A/I collective issued a statement acknowledging the hack and that the “attacker may have had access to the users database.” The collective warned that the hackers could have accessed the “list of email addresses of the people who manage the blogs and their passwords.”

The password information for the user accounts, however, was stored “hashed,” A/I said, rather than in plain text, making it substantially harder to access.

Shortly after A/I published its statement about hashed passwords, AstraRCE posted an image of the statement alongside a caption suggesting that they had direct knowledge of the data that was breached.

“Yep,” AstraRCE wrote. “The government has their emails and dehashed results.”

One minute later, DataRepublican verified AstraRCE’s statement: “Can confirm the authorities have everything that was on the NoBlogs servers.”

The post Pentagon Employee DataRepublican Posts Inside Info About Hacks Against the Far Left appeared first on The Intercept.

Though Flock’s investors and executives insist its surveillance dragnet thwarts the most serious of crimes, it turns out police are also using the company’s technology to go after some of the pettiest possible offenses: curfew violations, loitering, and simply being homeless.

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When police seek footage from Flock’s more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, they select a category of crime corresponding with the alleged offense they are investigating, such as hit-and-run or burglary. Among the choices is the supposed crime of being suspicious in public, formally categorized by Flock as “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”

Records obtained from the police department in Plano, Illinois, reveal that law enforcement agencies nationwide conducted more than 1,200 Flock searches while investigating alleged “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”

As this data set reflects only searches of Flock cameras that extended to Plano’s network, this is assuredly just a tiny fraction of the total number of “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” investigations using Flock nationwide. Records hosted by the website Have I Been Flocked? — which aggregates such logs — show hundreds more of these loitering searches in other states.

The Plano searches were conducted by police departments throughout Illinois, from neighboring states, and from a Georgia town more than 600 miles away. Many queries were license plate searches pertaining specific vehicles; others show police surveilling people on foot for the crime of essentially standing suspiciously.

Plano’s deputy chief of police Gene Morton told The Intercept the town did not install Flock cameras until the end of February. The department shared data from January because it had previously signed an agreement with Flock to search the broader network before its own cameras were operational.

Flock did not respond to a request for comment.

Police in Norcross, Georgia, for example, conducted a smartphone-based search on January 31 with “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” as the stated justification. It tapped into data recorded by 6,098 different Flock camera networks, each consisting of an untold number of separate cameras that surveilled anyone who moved past them.

The search logs obtained by The Intercept do not break out “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” separately, so it is unknown in each case what exactly police were searching for. In some cases police appended extra information; the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for example, searched over 17,000 Flock cameras while investigating “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations – Suspicious person at planned protest site.”

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When asked about these queries, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Josh DeVine told The Intercept that the searches in fact originated with the state’s Tennessee Fusion Center, which is operated by both the TBI and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. DeVine referred The Intercept’s questions to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Flock cameras have also been used to zero in on the homeless: Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, shared Flock search data from the West Palm Beach Police Department with The Intercept that included a query pegged to an “outside agency dropping vagrant off” in the city.

In January, police in LaGrange, Georgia, searched more than 6,000 Flock networks on the basis that someone walked out of a house “with a significant amount of traffic.” Officers from the same agency earlier this year searched more than 15,000 Flock systems because of someone “lingering at a stop sign around midnight last night.”

In the data reviewed by The Intercept, most of these loitering searches didn’t include any corresponding case number, suggesting these queries were not part of broader criminal investigations. Some of the searches reviewed by The Intercept note a “suspicious” person spotted outdoors, without any additional justification for the dragnet.

Jay Stanley — a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy, and technology project — told The Intercept these searches indicate surveillance mission creep. “This is in line with what we see with these technologies sold on the basis of movie plot scenario, dramatic ‘saving the day.’ And yet when you look under the hood, they’re often used to nickel and dime people for the most prosaic offenses,” he said. “They become part of many departments’ over-policing.”

Loitering and vagrancy laws have an ignoble history across the country as pretextual statutes, many originating in the Jim Crow era, for the targeting of Black Americans guilty of nothing other than existing in public. Some of these laws have been struck down because of the extent to which they criminalize the most mundane behaviors: standing, walking, or simply hanging out. In 1972, the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a Jacksonville, Florida, loitering ordinance targeting, among other things, “persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object” and “habitual loafers.”

Stanley pointed out that any guardrails against abuse of Flock’s camera networks is entirely self-enforced by the company, which has an interest in police using it as much as possible, and self-oversight by the police themselves. “We know that police stations don’t seem to be doing this,” he added. “Most police departments are not really paying attention.”

Correction: September 10, 2026, 2:46 p.m. ET
This article was corrected to indicate that cameras in Plano, Illinois, were not searched in each of the 1,200 “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” queries recorded by that town’s police department. Plano provided data about Flock searches starting in January, but the town’s own Flock cameras were not installed until February.

The post Cops Are Using Flock to Spy on People for the Crime of Standing Around appeared first on The Intercept.

The desire for a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates” to Pentagon commands was revealed in files released to The Intercept as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking information about the military’s secretive deals with AI companies.

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OpenAI, along with rivals Google, xAI, and Anthropic, all agreed in 2025 to develop militarized prototypes of their state-of-the-art AI to assist the armed forces in uses including logistics, intelligence decision-making, and general “warfighting.” Earlier this year, the Pentagon sought to expand the scope of these agreements and deploy them across U.S. classified computer networks, resulting in a high-profile showdown with Anthropic over whether and how the company could restrain military uses of its technology.

The clause seeking “minimal refusal rates” from OpenAI appears in an updated contract — version “P00003” — expanding upon last summer’s prototype deal, worth up to $200 million over the contract’s two-year duration. A separate document, signed by both OpenAI and the government on February 6, indicates that OpenAI agreed on that day to the contents of an expanded version “P00003.”

OpenAI and the Pentagon deny agreeing to such “minimal refusal ” language, claiming that the “P00003” document provided to The Intercept was a draft and not the final version. “OpenAI has never agreed to contract language requiring ‘minimal refusal rates.’ This language does not appear in our executed contract,” said spokesperson Nate Evans.

“The document you received appears to be an earlier draft proposed by the Department before we provided feedback. We rejected that language, the department agreed to remove it, and the final executed agreement does not include it,” Evans said.

Working with Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, The Intercept’s FOIA inquiry specifically sought only final, executed contract documents. The request asked the Pentagon to exclude any draft materials. None of the documents released through the lawsuit is marked as a draft.

When asked to confirm whether the document containing the “minimal refusal rates” clause was in the final agreement, a Department of Justice attorney representing the Pentagon in the lawsuit said it was indeed the signed and executed version of the contract.

Hours later, and following The Intercept’s outreach to OpenAI, however, the Pentagon’s lawyer said to disregard the prior confirmation, stating that the Department of Defense required more time to investigate the matter.

The Intercept was then contacted by Trevor Tiedeman, a special assistant to the under secretary of war for research and engineering, who prior to his Pentagon position worked for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. “There might be some stray voltage or wires crossing between whatever FOIA information you may have received versus what actually exists versus what is an executed contract per se,” Tiedeman said in an interview.

He suggested the document containing the “minimal refusal rates” clause may have been a draft copy, but said he was unsure of exactly what the document was, why it was produced to The Intercept pursuant to its FOIA request and lawsuit, or why the Department of Defense abruptly reversed course.

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Tiedeman told The Intercept he would provide a full accounting of how the document was erroneously flagged by Pentagon FOIA officers, cleared for release by the Department of Defense, and then confirmed as accurate by the Pentagon’s lawyers. When asked if the Pentagon could share the correct version of the OpenAI contract it ostensibly neglected to release, Tiedeman said he would investigate the matter. He then stopped responding to The Intercept’s inquiries.

OpenAI similarly did not provide the full contract. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Days later, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Pentagon further backtracked, stating the document in question “was not the final version of that document,” and that the “correct document” would be shared later, “although I do not have a definitive timeline.”

Department of Defense spokesperson Jacob Bliss later said in a statement “the phrase ‘minimal refusal rates’ does not appear in any active Department of War contract with OpenAI.”

The language indicating the military sought a more pliable version of OpenAI’s technology is found in a section of a contract document describing what OpenAI was obligated to deliver to the Pentagon. These deliverables included “Testing, Evaluation, and Refinement of OpenAI Mission Models” for “national security problem sets.” The document explains “’OpenAI Mission Models’ refer to OpenAI models that are designed for national security use cases and have minimal refusal rates.”

There is no indication in the paperwork about what these “national security problem sets” may entail. Nor is there any description about the kinds of requests the Pentagon hoped OpenAI’s technology would minimally refuse. However, a large language model that would aid in the process of spying on, targeting, and killing people would require a substantial relaxation of safeguards to be useful for any military.

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Like many of its rival platforms, OpenAI’s flagship LLMs contain built-in guardrails that direct the tool to reject certain queries, typically on the basis of safety. Asking the consumer version of ChatGPT for help prioritizing drone-based airstrike targets, for example, generates this reply: “I can’t provide a prioritization scheme for conducting UAV airstrikes against specific enemy combatants.” OpenAI and its competitors ban the public from using their models for other dangerous applications, like the development of weapons of mass destruction.

Heidy Khlaaf, chief scientist at the AI Now Institute and former systems safety engineer at OpenAI, told The Intercept the notion of national security-specific guardrails is in itself worrying. “Minimal refusal is likely referring to little or no safeguards on the model being used,” Khlaaf said.

No matter the final contract language, experts like Khlaaf are concerned about the role corporate policy is already playing in combat. “It is a worrying development that private corporations are given the power to [make] determinations in warfare that are ultimately state obligations, whether it be for targeting recommendations, or the guardrails deployed to constrain a state’s military use.”

Questions of what limits — if any — tech firms can or should place on battlefield usage were at the center of this year’s public brawl between the Pentagon and Anthropic. The company claims its military deal to expand into classified networks collapsed when the Defense Department refused to place contractual prohibitions against the use of its technology for autonomous weapon systems and domestic surveillance. The Trump administration in turn designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk and moved to ban it from government use (the designation was overturned late last month by a federal judge).

Such tensions didn’t stop OpenAI from quickly cementing its version of the deal. On February 27, OpenAI signed the latest iteration of its Pentagon agreement, permitting the use of its services across the U.S. military’s classified networks. The classified deployment contract update includes the same “Testing, Evaluation, and Refinement of OpenAI Mission Models” header, but its text, unlike the previous version, is redacted entirely.

OpenAI claimed that it secured red lines on autonomous killings and spying against Americans. But the way the deal is drafted ultimately allows for any uses the government deems legal.

The post The Pentagon Asked OpenAI for Artificial Intelligence Designed to Rarely Say No appeared first on The Intercept.

The documents, many heavily redacted, consist of contract paperwork from deals originally signed in July 2025 between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, as well as later amendments to those agreements. Through the contracts, each worth up to $200 million, the companies agreed to build prototypes of artificial intelligence tools to “improve military advantage, military utility, or enhance military decision making” across the whole of the armed forces. These prototypes, aimed at applications from “warfighting” and automated decision-making to logistics and military intelligence, would go on to form the basis of the artificial intelligence tools now deployed across the Department of Defense’s classified networks. The document set includes one contract reflecting OpenAI’s classified network deployment; The Intercept is awaiting the government’s production of equivalent documents from the other contractors.

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The contract materials show the close and complex partnership between the Pentagon and the AI industry, and detail the extent to which AI firms themselves are expected to influence how their technology is used to augment the U.S. capacity to wage war.

“This appears to be the first time the extent of collaboration between frontier AI labs and the Pentagon is spelled out in explicit terms,” Sophia Goodfriend, a University of Cambridge research fellow and non-resident fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative studying the impact of big data and machine learning on military conflict, told The Intercept. “What’s particularly notable is the terms by which engineers are working in lockstep with the department of war to engineer AI systems for surveillance, targeting, and killing.”

Official announcements following the 2025 deals were light on details and heavy on platitudes. “We must equip our warfighters with 21st-century technology in order to defeat 21st-century threats,” explained Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell at the time.

Google was similarly cagey: “These advanced AI solutions will enable the DoD to effectively address defense challenges and scale the adoption of agentic AI across enterprise systems to drive innovation and efficiency with agile, proven technology,” the company said.

The contract documents for the prototyping project paint a clearer picture, revealing deals that involve far more than a simple sale of software.

An “information sharing” provision in all four agreements, for instance, creates a two-way exchange of data and expertise. The companies agreed not only to provide access to their best large language models, but also to “inform DOD and CDAO [Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office] strategy on frontier AI and AI,” as phrased in the agreement with Google.

Under the agreements, the AI labs were approved to receive an array of sensitive information, which could include “benchmarks datasets for DoD use cases, appropriate briefings on DoD operational missions and threats to inform development / release of technologies, their application to DoD operational problems, or DoD plans and strategies for future AI adoption.”

All four companies would in turn provide the Pentagon “feedback on DoD strategies for frontier AI adoption to ensure that AI capabilities can be delivered and scaled to meet the warfighter’s needs.” The companies also pledged to offer briefings on corporate inner workings, including “frontier AI model performance, case studies on current or likely future frontier AI applications, or projections of future trends in frontier AI maturation.”

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The labs would sometimes be the ones offering intelligence briefings on foreign actors, with Google tapped to inform the Pentagon on “AI tactics and techniques of adversaries” of the United States. These briefings would be conducted in both unclassified and classified settings.

The collaboration also entails Big Tech providing training and educational seminars directly to the military, including “Presentations and briefings at technical exchange meetings on relevant topics, including frontier AI model performance and case studies of frontier AI applications.” One document notes that Google, for example, would lead multiple seminars on “responsible AI” deployment.” The documents state engineers and policy experts from all four contractors will conduct “tabletop exercises,” gamified simulations of real-world scenarios, with the Pentagon.

This back and forth between the military and private sector would, the Pentagon hoped, allow for “iterative refinement of frontier AI models to address real-world challenges in areas such as intelligence analysis, cybersecurity, and autonomous systems,” according to contract language with all four companies.

The AI companies were contractually scheduled to provide “risk forecasting, and threat ideation exercises” — predictions of pitfalls and dangers their own products might pose in the future. “Frontier AI labs have advanced risk forecasting tradecraft and a clear vision of the next wave of frontier AI technological developments,” the contracts read. “Frontier AI companies can help DoD gain a better understanding of the risks that might be associated with subsequent near-term frontier AI models or features, to avoid strategic surprise and to mitigate the associated risks.”

Heidy Khlaaf, chief scientist at the AI Now Institute and former safety engineer at OpenAI, told The Intercept this is a dubious claim with dangerous implications. Pointing to recent disclosures by OpenAI and Anthropic that semi-autonomous large language models broke into computer networks owned by other companies during testing, Khlaaf questioned their fitness to help build guardrails in the first place. “This is a very concerning development,” she said.

According to Khlaaf, the “risk forecasts” so far offered by frontier AI labs have been light on evidence and tend to “emphasize self-beneficial skewed risks such as a purported AI arms race and speculative ‘existential’ risks,” like self-aggrandizing science fiction-style “Terminator” scenarios.

The public would be better served, she said, with a reliance on independent assessment of the risks these companies present, not the word of the companies themselves. Trusting companies to self-report the risks of their own products constitutes both a conflict of interest, Khlaaf added, and a “subversion of democratic processes when AI labs are allowed to take over the arbitration of risk determinations with life-or-death consequences.”

As the prototyping effort progressed, the contract documents show the scope of the project expanded. New versions of the contract show additional deliverables included in the list of what the Pentagon was purchasing. The government redacted descriptions of these new deliverables on the basis of military secrecy and corporate confidentiality.

It was during the negotiation of these subsequent amendments when Anthropic and the Pentagon had their falling out. Anthropic refused to sign a follow-up deal to allow deployment of its technology on classified military networks without contractual prohibitions against use for domestic spying and autonomous weapons, leading Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to designate the firm a “supply chain risk” in March and ban its services from government use, a decision overturned by a federal judge last month.

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The Department of Defense quickly reached follow-up agreements with Anthropic’s main competitors — Google, OpenAI, and xAI — to apply the tools they had been developing since the summer of 2025 to classified military networks. OpenAI’s deal, described by CEO Sam Altman as “definitely rushed,” was reportedly finalized on February 27. The following day, the company published a blog post defending “Our agreement with the Department of War” and insisting there were clauses prohibiting its technology’s use for domestic surveillance.

An amended contract document obtained by The Intercept through its lawsuit dated February 27 contains new language, including a clause noting that OpenAI will embed company engineers within the military to aid U.S. Government employees in implanting and utilizing its AI system. These workers, the document notes, “can be deployed to warfighting support settings including, but not limited to, combatant commands, service components, and theatre components.” The February 27 amendments also include a section on “System Oversight” is redacted in its entirety.

None of the documents released to The Intercept pertaining to xAI or Google’s equivalent agreements contain any such oversight section.

Two documents indicate the Department of Defense asked OpenAI to minimize the extent to which its large language model would refuse to do what was requested by the military. The Department of Defense and OpenAI said those documents were draft materials incorrectly provided to The Intercept, and that the final contract included no such provision.

(In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

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The contractual coziness with the world’s most powerful military indicates just how far the artificial intelligence industry has strayed from its earlier public commitments to safety and global prosperity. OpenAI, originally founded as a nonprofit “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” up until two years ago explicitly banned “military and warfare” use in its terms of service. The following year Google reversed a similar self-imposed ban on using its state-of-the-art AI services for surveillance or “technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.”

Both companies are now eagerly landing slices of the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, and for opportunities to augment the killing power of a military that has recently bombed schoolgirls in Iran and civilian vessels in the Caribbean.

Goodfriend, the researcher, said the contracts illustrate the illusory nature of values statements published by these labs. “In recent months companies like Anthropic and Open AI have maintained ‘firm red lines’ when it comes to developing autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance tools” long after they signed contracts to build “autonomous systems” for the military, she said.

“All this indicates these labs and their personnel have been far more closely integrated into DOD AI development than previously understood and casts some doubt on the supposed contractual limits they have intended to place on the DoD’s use of these systems,” Goodfriend said.

Anthropic, Google, and xAI did not provide comment or answer questions about their respective contracts. In a statement to The Intercept, OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans said “Our tools are built to support legitimate national security work — including vital cyber defense efforts — while refusing uses that cross the red lines we publicly announced. These restrictions are also reflected in our signed agreement: no use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance, to direct autonomous weapons systems, or for high-stakes automated decisions. We will continue to work closely with the Department to make sure our AI tools are deployed responsibly and safely.”

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On the long timeline of American warfare, these artificial intelligence tools are in their infancy. The Pentagon’s use of artificial intelligence in the process of killing, however, is not a hypothetical. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that despite Hegseth’s ban, U.S. Central Command used Anthropic’s large language model services to execute its bombardment of Iran, including for “target identification.”

Despite the intimacy of technology firms and military using it to pinpoint airstrikes, it’s unclear what oversight, if any, these companies have over their own weaponized software once it is in the Pentagon’s hands. When asked if his company’s tools were used in an American airstrike on the first day of the Iran war that killed 120 Iranian schoolchildren, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Bloomberg News he simply did not know. An August 24 report from the New York Times detailed the use of fully autonomous drones guided by machine learning software running on chips made by Nvidia, whose processors have helped make the explosive growth of Anthropic and OpenAI possible. The full extent of the U.S. tech sector’s involvement in killing abroad remains obscured behind trade secrecy and national security considerations.

“The same technology we saw autonomously hacking websites on the open internet weeks ago is being used to inform DoD decision-making,” said Vivian Dong of Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology. “The public deserves insight into how and under what constraints the Department is using this technology.”

The post AI Giants Work Hand-in-Hand With the Pentagon, Contracts Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the beginning of 2025, Flock has given 700 percent more to the partisan groups representing mayors, attorneys general, and governors than in the previous three years. The giving has gone to Democratic and Republican groups alike.

Donating to those groups is a time-worn strategy for companies under scrutiny. The gifts can sometimes reap face time with elected officials. Two major Flock competitors in the license-plate reader industry, Axon and Motorola Solutions, have also donated widely.

One group that received money from Flock, the Democratic Mayors of America, defended its decision to accept $30,000. A spokesperson said reports of Flock misuse are “deeply unsettling,” while arguing that the donations gave Flock no influence over local mayors.

Critics of money in politics have long raised concerns that such donations create, at a minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest. A surveillance skeptic said the groups could face blowback.

“There’s a reputational risk for them accepting donations from Flock at this time,” said Torin Monahan, a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Flock did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the past year, Flock has faced intense pushback from activists on the left and right over perceived civil liberties abuses. Flock was forced to admit that immigration officials had access to its data, despite earlier denials in the middle of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown last year. Dozens of police officers have also been accused of abusing Flock’s database to track people, often former romantic partners.

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Flock was founded in 2017, but it was only five years after that that it began doling out money to what are known as 527 groups, according to records compiled by the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica. The so-called 527 groups can raise unlimited funds directly from corporations and spend that money on key political races.

Flock’s giving began at a relatively meager rate: From 2022 to 2024, the company gave $20,000 to the Democratic Mayors Association and $10,000 to its Republican counterpart, the Community Leaders of America.

Its spending has skyrocketed since then. Since the beginning of 2025, the company donated a total of $240,000 to a longer list of groups that includes the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations and the Democratic and Republican Attorneys General Associations.

Flock’s pattern of donating to 527 groups was identified by a widely cited critic of the company, Jason Hunyar, who asked on his blog what the company was receiving in exchange for those donations.

Influence Investments

The donations came as Flock was hiring an army of lobbyists. It has spent more than $2 million on state and federal lobbying since the start of 2025, according to a recent report from the transparency group OpenSecrets.

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The rise of that multi-pronged influence campaign coincided with intense pushback to the company’s practices. Several members of Congress have proposed either outright bans or stricter regulations on Flock and other license-plate readers.

Much of the activism against Flock thus far has come at the local level. Scores of cities and other local governments have rejected or canceled Flock contracts or deactivated the company’s cameras since the start of 2026, according to the advocacy group DeFlock.

The suspicion crosses party lines. In Knox County, Tennessee, Republican Mayor Glenn Jacobs — the former professional wrestler Kane — recently led a campaign to cancel the company’s contract there. In Arizona, Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that she was launching a review of Flock and other camera networks.

Flock is not the only license-plate reader company that has routed money to political groups. Motorola Solutions, which counts cameras as one product among many in its portfolio, has donated more than $986,000 since the start of 2023, according to public records.

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Axon, which also hawks Tasers and body-worn cameras, has donated $225,000 to Democratic and Republican attorney general groups over the same period. (Motorola Solutions and Axon did not respond to requests for comment.)

Making Connections

Corporate donations to 527 groups long been controversial. Companies can use the groups to build connections with the same elected officials making decisions about whether to purchase their products and services.

More than a decade ago, the New York Times documented how corporations facing lawsuits used donations to the Republican and Democratic attorney general groups to cozy up to decision-makers.

On its website, the Democratic Mayors Association touts a program that connects mayors “with leaders from the private sector, organized labor, advocacy groups, and partner organizations to build relationships, share ideas, and take on the most pressing challenges facing America’s cities.”

That group defended its decision to accept donations from Flock.

“No donation made to the Democratic Mayors Association guarantees any form of influence over the mayors, no matter who the donor is,” said a spokesperson. “The reporting we’ve seen about police departments across the country misusing Flock cameras and the data is deeply unsettling, which is why mayors across the country have taken action to implement strict guardrails or ban them altogether. Ultimately, Democratic mayors have presided over a historic drop in crime and have proven they know how to keep their communities safe. Each mayor makes their own decisions about what is best for their cities, and we trust their judgement.”

The Democratic Governors Association also defended its donations from Flock and other corporations.

“The DGA does not take policy positions as an organization,” said a spokesperson for the group. “Every dollar sent to the DGA helps us elect more Democratic governors who make their own policy decisions about how to make life better in their states and stand up to Donald Trump.”

Other groups that have received money from one or more of three leading companies in the license-plate reader world — Axon, Flock, and Motorola Solutions — did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Flock Donations to Local Politicians’ Groups Skyrocket as Protests Against AI Cameras Mount appeared first on The Intercept.

Created by tech giant Palantir, a CIA-backed firm known for data mining and using artificial intelligence for everything from warfighting to “predictive policing,” the ELITE app helps ICE target immigrants and issues a “confidence score” for how accurate the information on a target is. The app analyzes data from government agencies and other sources, producing dossiers on targets, compiling them into lists, and mapping their locations.

The debut of ELITE — Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting — came just as ICE added over 12,000 employees through an expedited hiring surge, placing a badge and a gun in the hands of new recruits in record time, thanks to cuts to ICE’s training curriculum.

Thousands of the new ICE hires, then, were able to hit the streets without cleared background checks, according to reporting by Reuters in early 2026.

The hiring spree at ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, coupled with the powerful new handheld technology of the ELITE app, created potential civil liberties nightmares and threats to national security, according to ICE whistleblowers, former Department of Homeland Security officials, and legal experts who spoke to The Intercept.

“No one should have been hired by DHS before background reviews were completed. This never happened in previous administrations,” said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Homeland Security. “Furthermore, giving the newly hired ICE ERO staff access to sensitive databases such as ELITE threatens public safety by allowing non-vetted teams to access and potentially misuse data.”

The ELITE app, Callahan said, did not go through the usual process government tools undergo to prevent abuses and ensure privacy rights.

“It’s one of the first applications they give new officers so they can start working,” said one ICE deportation officer who came through the hiring surge. “You can access it without full background clearance.”

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“Some of these guys should’ve never been hired, let alone have access to the information on ELITE,” the officer, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihood, told The Intercept.

Every ICE deportation officer is issued a phone, where the ELITE app comes standard, according to five ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept. (Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.)

The five ICE officials, who each work in different regions across the country, said deportation officers without completed background checks continue to work in all their jurisdictions, some of whom were hired nearly a year ago.

No Privacy Assessment

ELITE’s user guide identifies a dozen distinct sources that the app draws from. The databases include sensitive data sets like addresses, criminal histories, immigration records, court rulings, and other personal information about both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Much of that information would constitute what the government calls PII, or personally identifiable information. According to a Department of Homeland Security document that catalogs the agency’s use of artificial intelligence, the ELITE app does involve PII.

A 2002 law, however, says that government agencies must conduct and publish the findings of a “privacy impact assessment” for “all new or substantially changed technology that collects, maintains, or disseminates personally identifiable information (PII),” according to a Justice Department summary of the statute.

The processes are designed to assess how technology affects personal privacy and outline what safeguards are in place to ensure accountability if systems are misused.

Yet the Department of Homeland Security privacy office hasn’t published an assessment for ELITE, according to Callahan, the former Homeland Security official, who also served as the department’s chief privacy officer.

“The DHS privacy office should have worked with ICE to publish a privacy impact assessment,” said Callahan, noting a general lack of productivity by the privacy office. “In fact, the DHS privacy office has only published one PIA all year. In comparison, I published 228 PIAs in my three-and-a-half years as privacy officer.”

The failure to conduct a privacy impact assessment has a profound impact on transparency and accountability, the very aspects of privacy policy the E-Government Act of 2002 was intended to regulate.

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“This is not a technicality,” said Clare Garvie, a privacy lawyer and deputy director of technology policy at the New York University Law School’s Policing Project. “PIAs are an essential component of transparency and privacy governance, they are how the public understands what information is collected about us, how long it is kept, who can use it, and what remedies exist if it is wrong or subject to misuse.”

“If ICE can’t fulfill this prerequisite,” Garvie said, “I lack confidence in its ability to use the tool in a lawful, privacy-protective manner in the field.”

The Department of Homeland Security site for cataloging its uses of AI does list a privacy impact assessment on its page for ELITE, but the assessment is not actually for the ELITE app. Instead, the link goes to a 2019 privacy assessment for ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database.

The Enforcement Integrated Database is just one of the systems ELITE incorporates into its searches, meaning the PIA only scratches the surface of what personally identifying information appears in ELITE and how the app organizes the data.

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“The document DHS points to as fulfilling this obligation was updated in 2019, years before it acquired ELITE,” said Garvie. “This PIA completely fails to describe the app’s data sources, its AI analysis, or the inferences it produces that are used to focus immigration investigations and removal operations.”

Public concerns surrounding the incorporation of AI surveillance in law enforcement — including ICE’s new AI initiative to combat doxing of its staff — are reaching a boiling point in the U.S. today, leaving some ICE officials concerned.

“I know I sound crazy, but this is 1984 shit,” said another ICE official familiar with ELITE who requested anonymity to protect their job. “ELITE is used on illegal immigrants right now but can easily be used on Americans.”

The post ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks appeared first on The Intercept.

In a federal court filing in New York, the Justice Department argued that the U.S. has a vested interest in OpenAI having access to a vast array of intellectual property. The Trump administration warned that restricting OpenAI’s access to the data could hamper scientific progress and harm the country’s dominance in the race for artificial intelligence.

“The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally,” said the filing, which was signed by associate attorneys general Stanley Woodward Jr. and Brett Shumate, along with the attorney general’s senior counsel Michael Weisbuch.

Matt Topic, the litigating attorney representing The Intercept in its lawsuit, warned that the Trump administration’s position was out of touch and a threat to the financial survival of media outlets.

“This is pretty reflective of the administration’s pro-AI policies, which are out of step with the public skepticism of AI and out of step with our long tradition in this country of protecting human expression,” said Topic. “If the administration’s position was accepted, it would result in an unprecedented, uncompensated transfer of IP rights from news organizations to tech companies.”

The Intercept originally filed its lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in February 2024, arguing that OpenAI’s use of work reported and written by its journalists constituted a breach of copyright law. In November 2024, the judge then presiding over the case dismissed all of The Intercept’s claims against Microsoft, but allowed its claim against OpenAI to proceed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Intercept’s case was later consolidated under U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein alongside a number of other media plaintiffs, including the New York Times, Tribune Media Company, and Ziff Davis. 

OpenAI has argued that its practice of hoovering up staggering amounts of copyright-protected materials to feed its large language models — the underlying technology powering generative AI tools like ChatGPT — falls under the domain of “fair use,” a doctrine protecting the unlicensed use of copyrighted material under certain circumstances.

In its filing, the Justice Department supported OpenAI’s fair-use defense, accusing the Times and other plaintiffs of taking an overly narrow definition of the doctrine. OpenAI’s use of the material, the government argued, met the criteria for “transformative” use, one of the ways in which “fair use” comes into play.

“In this litigation, the New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs). That result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts,’” the filing says. “An erroneous fair use ruling would hamper competition in the market for LLMs, because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees.”

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The filing is the latest move from the Trump administration to protect the interests of U.S.-based artificial intelligence companies amid an AI arms race with companies based in other countries, most notably China.

In December 2025, Trump signed an executive order aimed at creating a federal standard, applicable in all 50 states, to “ensure that the United States wins the AI race, as we must.”

Topic, The Intercept’s attorney, said this position — combined with the fact that the Justice Department has not been privy to any discovery in the case — shows that the Trump administration is operating from a fixed position in support of tech companies, rather than arguing the merits of the case.

“What they’re saying isn’t based on any understanding of actual facts,” Topic said. “It just reflects what Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s PR machines have been putting out into the public.”

The post Trump Admin Tells Court: Let OpenAI Rip Off The Intercept’s Articles appeared first on The Intercept.

The memo, signed by Acting ICE Director David Venturella and leaked to The Intercept by ICE employees, identifies a company called ZeroFox as the tech firm behind the initiative. The communication describes ZeroFox as “a modernized protective technology solution designed to strengthen safeguards for our most valuable resource: You and your families.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, quietly entered a $15 million contract with ZeroFox in July for software licenses to support ICE operations and investigations, according to public procurement records. The records indicate that ZeroFox will provide services for the Office of Intelligence at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division.

ZeroFox develops AI-driven software aimed at stopping data leaks across social media and the dark web, according to its website. “ZeroFox never stops finding, mapping, and monitoring your digital presence,” the company vows. It’s not clear from the contract or the internal email how, precisely, the new initiative will function, and neither ICE nor ZeroFox responded to requests for comment.

“It sounds like inside surveillance,” said an ICE official who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

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ZeroFox has used its tech in the past to identify and categorize people engaged in political activism, including during public unrest in Baltimore after the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The ICE official expressed concern that ZeroFox tech could now be used to weed out whistleblowers and critics of the Trump administration.

“If things go sideways they may just throw all your info out there, make you out to be the problem or dox you,” the official said. “I don’t trust it.”

According to Richard Forno, associate director of the cybersecurity institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, it’s not shocking that ICE would contract with AI companies that “may have checkered histories.”

“It’s plausible that this tech could be used to seek out whistleblowers,” Forno told The Intercept. “For example, if ICE internal affairs or leadership can seed information that gets leaked, and then that information is then passed along to a reporter, you’re kind of setting up a honey pot situation to figure out who the leakers are.” He pointed out that the White House has already set a precedent for targeting critics as “terrorists” or “extremists” on fairly broad terms.

In 2015, ZeroFox offered its services to Baltimore officials for free, sending Baltimore Police a list of “threat actors” identified by its social-media monitoring system, which classified peaceful BLM protest organizers as physical threats. (ZeroFox’s co-founders told the press at the time that the classifications were likely based on their social media follower counts, and that they were labeled “physical” because they were “acting in real life” rather than online.)

After the January 6 attack, the FBI struggled to identify online extremist activity using its recently acquired ZeroFox technology, which the bureau’s agents referred to with “a derisive nickname,” according to the Washington Post, that involved “replacing the ‘Fox’ with a similar-sounding expletive.”

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ZeroFox’s relationship with ICE, according to the leaked memo, seems to be focused on detecting information online that could identify or “dox” ICE employees. It’s understandable for a person to want to limit the personal information published about them online, said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“However,” she said, “if ICE is instituting this program to shield officers and the agency itself from public accountability, especially when information is already publicly available, then that’s a serious concern and flies in the face of our democratic values.”

ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept said some ICE personnel already use third-party services to keep their information private.

“I frankly don’t trust the feds with that,” said a second ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept under anonymity to protect his livelihood. “I’m not really keen on giving my PII” — personally identifiable information — “to a company that doesn’t have a solid track record with government contracts.”

ZeroFox is owned by private equity firm Haveli Investments, which bought the company for roughly $350 million in 2024. Bryan Ware, a former assistant director for cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration, currently serves as an executive at ZeroFox.

The post ICE Is Paying a Controversial AI Firm to Hide the Identities of Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday that they were targeting the Italy-based A/I Collective with terror sanctions. Federal law gives the Treasury Department broad discretion to apply the terror label to foreign groups.

A wide array of anarchist, antifascist, and far-left groups in the U.S. and abroad use the privacy-minded collective’s offerings, including an anonymous email service and its popular noblogs.org blogging platform.

The practice of designating an internet platform and service provider as a terror group — rather than those pursuing violence themselves — has “huge” implications for the future free speech on the internet, warned Jillian York, the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“They are going after the messenger,” York said. “I don’t think that the members of the group would necessarily condone the actions of the people that they hosted. What they do condone is the freedom to host, the ability to be anonymous, the ability to be private.”

The A/I Collective told The Intercept that it is exploring its legal options to fight the sanctions, which block U.S. citizens and companies from providing the group with financial support.

In an unsigned statement, the group said that it denies the U.S. government’s allegations. 

“Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism,” the group said. “Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.”

The U.S. government’s move could have ripple effects far beyond Italy. 

Groups using the A/I Collective’s services range from an anarchist radio show in Asheville, North Carolina; to a blog documenting attacks on anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” under the Jane’s Revenge moniker; to the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair. The bookfair warned Wednesday that its website “will most likely go down soon because of US sanctions on Noblogs.”

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The State and Treasury Departments justified the designation by alleging that the A/I Collective, also known as Autistici/Inventati, has provided services to foreign terror groups, including anarchists who have launched attacks on railroads and pipelines in Europe, and by domestic left-wing groups that have employed violence.

“A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services — including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools — to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere,” a State Department spokesperson said in a press release. “These tools are specifically designed to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks.”

It is unclear how many groups in the U.S. could be forced offline, or to shift their providers, because of the terror designation. The A/I Collective said it could not provide an estimate of U.S-based groups that it hosts, because it does not ask its users for any private or personal information.

Nor was it immediately clear whether simply hosting a site using the collective’s services would be illegal if no money changes hands. Still, the collective says that it relies heavily on voluntary, suggested donations, and many U.S.-based groups appear to be scrambling for alternative hosting providers.

The A/I Collective was sanctioned under the Treasury Department’s authority to label groups specially designated global terrorists. U.S. citizens convicted of violating those sanctions can face stiff penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

If U.S. groups continue to use the collective’s services, the U.S. government could use that affiliation against them, said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. The Treasury Department can even label U.S.-based groups as specially designated global terrorists, although they have more standing to challenge that designation in court.

The designation of the A/I Collective as a foreign terror group is the next step in a sequence that began with Trump’s designation of antifa as a “domestic terror organization” last September, said Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University who wrote a book about antifascism.

Where the Trump administration goes next is the “million-dollar question,” Bray said.

“It seems to be they’re playing a bit of a long game,” he said, “where they try to establish the existence of a supposed violent, left-wing terror network — which they have had trouble doing, but they have tried. But then, of course the way they make that affect the left more broadly is to criminalize those who they claim are aligned with it.”

The post Trump Goes After Anonymous Email Provider in Italy. The Real Target Is Free Speech in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

Among the partners for the State Department’s new “Freedom Tech Excellence Program” is Palantir, the AI and data integration firm started by right-wing powerbroker Peter Thiel. Under the program, company employees will go on temporary assignments to advise the government on “digital freedom and freedom of expression,” including counter-surveillance and dealing with First Amendment issues.

“FTEP brings private sector talent to the Department for limited-term assignments to advance diplomatic efforts on key issues including online freedom of expression, privacy-enhancing technologies, countering digital surveillance, and responsible AI governance,” according to the State Department’s website.

Palantir is best known for building large-scale data analysis platforms. In addition to corporate contracts, the company’s massive government tenders include database, surveillance, and tracking tools for police and federal authorities. Among its government clients are the military, the State Department itself, and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Palantir and its key personnel have also been involved in multiple lawsuits against journalistic outlets.

The firm’s history has raised criticisms of its role in the new State Department initiative, especially given the Trump administration own’s dubious track record on First Amendment issues.

“To some extent, this announcement and this program sound like doublespeak,” said Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Certainly neither this State Department, nor the partners they have announced so far, are trustworthy leaders in what they identify as online freedom of expression or countering digital surveillance.”

The new initiative is planned to run through the beginning of 2029, according to the State Department’s press office. While participants could be placed anywhere in the agency and may require security clearances, the Freedom Tech Excellent Program “is not geared towards bolstering the Department’s internal application or operational use of AI technologies,” the department said in a statement to The Intercept.

Anduril, a military tech firm with links to Palantir and Thiel, was also listed as a partner in the State Department initiative. Anduril’s executive chair Trae Stephens is a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, which has invested about $2.6 billion in Anduril. Besides a mutual appreciation of “The Lord of the Rings,” Thiel shares similar politics with Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and has backed Luckey’s new bank, Erebor.

Neither Anduril nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.

Palantir and the Feds

Palantir’s work has brought it notoriety across the globe, though at times defining what it does can be complex. It has repeatedly eschewed its label as a surveillance firm. Palantir CEO Alex Karp denied on a podcast last year that the company engages in unconstitutional surveillance work.

And, in an unsigned blog post last year, Palantir wrote, “Contrary to some media reports, we are not a surveillance company.”

Palantir, though, enabled U.S. mass surveillance by bolstering the National Security Agency’s global data collection efforts, according to documents provided to The Intercept by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Palantir helped the NSA expand a program that became notorious for its ability to hoover up Americans’ communications along with those from abroad.

More recently, the firm has become a focal point for protests in the U.K. over its massive contract with the National Health Service and its ties to the Israeli military. Just this week, the NHS apologized after admitting it had falsely stated that Palantir did not have access to identifiable patient data.

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Stateside, the company had a contract with New York City public hospitals that gave it access to patient information. The contract was allowed to expire after it came under scrutiny in an Intercept report. The Intercept also reported this year that Palantir has access to sensitive federal databases for its contract to aid in Internal Revenue Service investigations.

Palantir’s IRS work led to a letter last year from 10 members of Congress to Karp requesting information about the “mega-database” built off IRS data. In response, the firm again denied that it was engaging in widespread surveillance of Americans and that it was building any such database.

Palantir also has a 15-year relationship with ICE. The Intercept found that its contracts with the agency have aided immigration raids, including ones that led to family separations. And Palantir built bespoke software for ICE that helps track self-deportations and visa overstays.

In April, Reps. Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez, both Democrats from New York, sent a list of questions directed to ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, demanding information about how they were leveraging Palantir’s technology to create “a mass surveillance ecosystem.”

Attacks on Free Press

Along with eccentric far-right views and donations to MAGA Republicans, one of Thiel’s most well-known acts was his involvement in the lawsuit that drove the news outlet Gawker into bankruptcy.

Thiel had become upset with Gawker over the media company’s reporting about his personal life. He went on to spend $10 million secretly bankrolling lawsuits against the company, finally scoring with a major judgment in favor of the wrestler Hulk Hogan that caused Gawker to close and sell off its assets.

Journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said that Thiel constituted a “serious threat” to the group’s principles of “freedom of press and independence of media,” particularly in light of the secrecy around his role in the case. His actions were, RSF said, “nothing different to governments using legal or economic leverage to shut down a media that happens to displease them.”

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Palantir also recently filed a suit against Swiss online news magazine Republik for reporting on how Palantir repeatedly failed to land contracts with the Swiss government. Palantir claimed that Republik had an obligation to run a list of rebuttals from the firm.

A Swiss court, however, handed Palantir a defeat by siding with the outlet on all but one of the 23 charges and forcing Palantir to pay most of Republik’s legal fees. (In a since-deleted post on Medium responding to the Republik lawsuit, Palantir once again denied that it is a surveillance company.)

David Greene, senior counsel for anti-surveillance nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that positioning Palantir as a bulwark for civil rights undermined the government’s own free speech initiative.

“There’s a big problem right now with the U.S. government and the people outside government who exercise power, in terms of trying to claim free speech as a value when they clearly don’t sincerely hold that value,” Greene said. “It really lowers the esteem of the U.S. in terms of having any moral authority on freedom of expression grounds.”

The post State Department Wants Palantir’s Advice on Free Speech and “Countering Digital Surveillance” appeared first on The Intercept.

Google then purges these reviews and blocks the ability to write new ones, according to newly published research.

“Google actively suppresses carceral information, narratives, and digital trace data related to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) detention facilities,” wrote Muira McCammon, a professor at Tulane University’s Department of Communication who has been scraping and analyzing self-reported accounts of ICE imprisonment posted to Google Maps since last year.

Much of this record is now permanently deleted, erasing detailed testimony of people ingested by the U.S. deportation machine.

Last August, McCammon aggregated 1,636 posts from 26 different ICE facilities where Google still allowed users to post reviews and discovered there were 91 other immigration jails on Google Maps with no reviews.

“Google had already turned off reviews for the remaining 91 facilities,” McCammon told The Intercept. “Almost all of the Google reviews that I originally collected in 2025 are now no longer available.”

Only four ICE facilities appear to still permit reviews on Google Maps, she said.

Pulling the reviews has come with no public notice or explanation.

In 2023, Google said in a corporate blog post that it reserved the right to delete Maps reviews for locations that are “consistently unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic. This includes places that people go to without choice or places only accessible to people stationed or assigned there—such as police stations and prisons.”

Unhelpful to whom, however, is unclear: While some of the reviews in question were statements of protest that could have been left by anyone, many appeared to come from people directly affected by ICE. They described a variety of issues that would be of great material interest to anyone detained in the facilities or for people close to them.

“Reviews help people make decisions on where to go,” Google spokesperson Genevieve Park said in a statement, “and we don’t show reviews on several categories of places where people go without choice,” citing the company’s policy of removing Google Maps reviews that are “unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic.”

In the past, Google has complied with requests to censor speech about ICE. In 2025, the company blocked Android users from downloading ICEBlock, an app that alerted people to crowdsourced sightings of ICE agents.

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Asked if the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, had communicated with Google about the reviews, Park said the takedowns were “unrelated—it was about enforcing our policy that prohibits reviews for places that people go to without choice.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for DHS denied that ICE requested any reviews of detention facilities be removed.

“Being in detention is a choice,” the Homeland Security spokesperson said, citing the department’s program to encourage an app-based system for self-deportation.

Many of the reviews McCammon aggregated were from despairing friends and relatives.

“My friend’s dad was sentenced to one month in jail,” read one review. “He served the time and then was moved to this facility for another 3 months. How is it not illegal to hold someone 3x longer than what they were sentenced to serve?”

A Spanish language review McCammon collected read, “You can barely hear the detainee when you make a phone call.”

Other posts reflect what apparent former detainees described as poor conditions, such as “The place is infested with roaches crawling all over the inmates body there,” or “Very bad experience i spent 2 months in this hell . . . 99% of staff is cruel and racist.”

One reviewer said many detainees weren’t able to communicate with ICE staff because of the language barrier:

I stayed there for more than a month. The food there was okay, but very unpalatable. They were all very kind. Due to the language barrier, there was a big barrier to communication. I felt that most people couldn’t express their thoughts and needs. Why didn’t they have a translator? ! Even if it’s not expensive. The air conditioner there was very cold, and many people, including me, caught cold from the cold. Even so, they were unwilling to turn up the air conditioner temperature. When I slept at night, I only had a thin blanket to cover myself, and it felt very cold.

Although Google’s stance appears to be that the censorship is based on a common-sense, consumer-centric view of Google Maps’ purpose, McCammon argues in her paper that these are essentially political decisions, made by “suppressing the circulation of carceral information and counter-narratives [and] calling into question how the company approaches the ideology of search, when it concerns the reputation of the U.S. administrative state.”

The post Google Is Censoring Reviews of ICE Detention Centers appeared first on The Intercept.

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After an ICE officer shot and killed a 25-year-old Colombian national this week in Biddeford, Maine, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin reportedly told Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, that officers involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras.

Yet the ICE officials who spoke with The Intercept, all of whom requested anonymity to protect their livelihoods, identified cameras among the equipment worn by two ICE officers nearby in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The body-worn devices were not designed solely to capture evidential video, and are used primarily as remote microphones for ICE officers’ radio communications. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept identified the accessories worn by ICE officers on the scene of the Maine shooting as Motorola SVX Video Remote Speaker Microphones, a wireless radio mic with one other important feature: a camera. (Motorola did not respond to a request to comment.)

Although the Motorola SVX worn by ICE officers are designed to work as body cameras, the ICE official said the function isn’t used.

“They have multiple functionalities,” one ICE official who identified the Motorola SVX at the scene in Maine told The Intercept. “However, we are currently only using them as mics because of the AXON contract.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, purchases body-worn cameras through a contract with Axon, a law enforcement tech firm. (Axon did not respond to a request for comment.)

Another ICE official showed The Intercept where, on their own Motorola SVX, a cover can be attached to the top of the device where the camera lens is, comparing it to the tech worn by officers at the Maine shooting scene.

“This is where the cover clips over the camera lens,” the second ICE officer said. “Since the cameras don’t work they just leave the cover on.”

The SVX mics worn by ICE are designed to record internally, capable of storing over 100 hours of standard-definition video, according to Motorola promotional materials and a technical support line. The video-recording function on the SVX mic, however, requires a subscription.

No Bodycam Footage

Motorola is a giant in the world of government law enforcement and security work.

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According to a document published on the Department of Homeland Security’s website, ICE alone expects to spend more than $100 million on a six-year contract for Motorola’s line of APX Next All-Band Smart Radios and accessories, which would include the SVX mic.

The deadly ICE shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine stoked national outrage, coming on the heels of another fatal ICE shooting of Mexican immigrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.

Neither man, according to news reports, had been the intended targets of the ICE arrest teams. And neither man’s death was captured by federal officers’ body-worn cameras, according to official reports.

Shortly after the Maine shooting, ICE ordered its officers in the field to halt nearly all traffic stops. After reports of the order emerged and Trump complained, border czar Tom Homan pivoted to say the ICE vehicle stops would continue.

Widely known today for its body cams, Axon used to be called Taser, named for the stun gun that built its reputation and which it still carries. The company does brisk business with ICE.

Last month, presidential financial disclosures raised eyebrows over an ICE public request for a $220 million stun gun contract that appeared tailor-made for Axon’s Tasers. Only two weeks before the request for information went out, according to the disclosures, President Donald Trump purchased as much as $5 million in shares from Axon.

During Trump’s winter immigration crackdown in Minnesota, ICE announced that it would be purchasing and distributing body cameras to every arrest team in the agency.

After the deaths of Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo over past week, however, the Trump administration said the distribution was incomplete.

“The body cameras have been ordered,” Homan, Trump’s border czar, said in a press conference. “There’s a deployment schedule on the books.”

The Homeland Security Department said that half of ICE field offices already had body-worn cameras and the rest were expected to get them in the next two months.

The new body cameras were funded through a $20 million congressional appropriation to expand ICE’s camera program, which includes contracts with Axon for the devices.

The post ICE Officers at Maine Shooting Scene Were Wearing Body Cameras. They Were Not Turned On. appeared first on The Intercept.

The crypto industry is putting hopes for its revival in a long-awaited bill, under debate in the Senate, called the Clarity Act, which could open the doors to Wall Street investments.

But there is one thing ironically standing in its way: Trump’s giant crypto haul.

The naked self-enrichment has turned crypto into a prime example of presidential corruption.

The result is that even crypto’s most staunch Democratic allies will find it hard to back a crypto wishlist like the Clarity Act, which will need support from at least seven Senate Democrats to overcome a filibuster.

Take crypto stalwarts like centrist Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who issued a statement demanding that any crypto bill include ethics provisions to stop Trump’s crypto profiteering.

With the industry poised to spend tens of millions more on the midterm elections, however, Gillibrand and other centrist Democrats may yet be tempted to sign off on window dressing instead of a crackdown, said crypto critics.

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“Sen. Gillibrand and too many of her colleagues prioritize and spend enormous time pushing crypto’s special interest agenda, which is to get legitimized by the weakest possible law and regulated by the smallest, most underfunded, least capable, and most capture-able financial regulator,” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, said in a statement last Monday. “That is presumably because the crypto industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns to buy friends and attempt to get crypto’s special interest agenda enacted.”

Gillibrand has dismissed those criticisms. In a statement of her own last week, she expressed her desire to both advance the bill and crack down on Trump.

“We cannot let self-dealing destroy an opportunity to strengthen consumer protections, crack down on illicit finance, and expand economic opportunity for the millions of Americans our financial system has left behind,” Gillibrand said. “The time to act is now — and that must include ethics reforms that prohibit members of Congress, the president, and their spouses from cashing in on their office.”

Declining Sector Hangs Hopes on Clarity Act

For crypto, the numbers are sobering. Bitcoin soared from roughly $60,000 just before Trump’s election to about twice that by October of last year. Since then, it and other digital assets have cratered. Bitcoin now trades back around $63,000 a token.

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The market’s gyrations did not stop Trump and his family members from profiting handsomely off the $TRUMP meme coin and other ventures. His roughly $1.4 billion of crypto profits last year meant that he cleared more than the largest publicly traded company in the industry, Coinbase, according to crypto commentator Scott Melker. The White House has defended Trump’s crypto windfall as legal, a point even his critics concede is likely true.

Crypto’s fortunes now appear to hinge largely on whether Congress passes the Clarity Act, which is intended to create an overall regulatory framework for the industry.

“If the bill passed, you would probably see a bump for the industry,” said Mark Hays, the associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. “So much of crypto rides on sentiment, and if the bill were passed and signed into law, you would likely see an increase in prices just based on that sentiment alone.”

One sign of how much of the industry is placing its bets on Congress came in a recent quarterly earnings call held by Coinbase. Analysts asked the company’s executives several times how the Clarity Act would affect their bottom line. The company’s executives said that it could mean that Wall Street, which has been reluctant to dive headlong into the industry, will finally start to spend on crypto.

Passing the law, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said, would “just unlock a lot of institutional capital that’ll flow into the space broadly.”

That is one of the outcomes that crypto skeptics fear most. If crypto becomes integrated with the economy rather than a speculative sideshow, they say, it risks taking down the entire system in a crash.

Democrats Holding the Keys

The only thing standing between crypto and its top priority are Senate Democrats. The House of Representatives, where crypto needs only a bare majority, already overwhelmingly passed last year a version of the Clarity Act with Democratic support. In the Senate, however, there are enough Democrats to block passage of the law with a filibuster. The question is whether they will.

Crypto needs to win over seven Democrats to beat a filibuster, or eight if Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., remains absent due to illness.

Progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have expressed broad concerns that the law could lead to the next financial crash. Centrists like Gillibrand, meanwhile, have voiced narrower concerns. One of their biggest hang-ups with the legislation, they say, is the question of whether it will rein in Trump’s crypto ventures.

Gillibrand occupies a powerful position in the party: She serves as the caucus’s top fundraiser as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And she has positioned herself as a leader in Clarity Act negotiations, despite not serving on the relevant committees.

Asked last month about the negotiations over the bill at the Aspen Ideas Festival — a cozy gathering of politicos and business executives in the Colorado mountain town — Gillibrand said she was working hard to overcome the ethics obstacle.

“We’re working hand in glove with Republicans,” Gillibrand said. “We’re negotiating with staff from the White House so that everyone is clear about what the bill is going to say, and we’re going to do our best to land that plane.”

Gillibrand’s public statements have repeatedly telegraphed her desire to see some version of the legislation passed. Gillibrand says it is urgent to get consumer protections on the books. Observers say the urgency may also be motivated by the industry’s massive campaign war chest.

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Over one-third of the corporate money spent on this year’s elections so far has come from the crypto industry, according to a recent report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. That amounts to $189 million, including $82 million routed through a single industry super PAC called Fairshake, which is backed by Coinbase.

Rick Claypool, the research director for Public Citizen’s president’s office, said that as chair of the DSCC, Gillibrand is keenly aware of crypto’s campaign spending potential.

“I’m sure it’s top of mind,” Claypool told The Intercept. “Part of the whole goal of the corporate crypto spending is to make sure that lawmakers in general, but also in particular those who are in fundraising, leadership positions, think of the industry before they think of voters.”

Other Democrats tipped as maybes on the bill include Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who last month nudged other Democrats on the banking committee to vote for a draft of the bill, along with a swath of the caucus’s more centrist members.

What Ethics?

It’s unclear what sort of ethics restrictions Republicans and Democrats have been working on behind closed doors.

The final text of the bill has yet to drop, despite a promise from Bitcoin evangelist Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., that it would be released over the July 4 weekend. The industry’s deadlines for passing the law keep slipping. Its best chance may be to secure passage before the Senate leaves August 10 for an extended period of work in their home states.

Hays said senators should ignore the industry’s artificial deadlines. His group recently released a poll suggesting that most voters are concerned about the crypto industry’s influence in Washington.

“Yes, Democrats are looking over their shoulder, but I think they should be reading the room and saying, ‘Wait a second, is this really a priority?’” Hays said. “Or, is this the kind of pay-to-play politics that have gotten so many voters frustrated in the first place?”

Correction: July 13, 2026, 8:59 a.m. ET
An earlier version of this article stated that Donald Trump disclosed his $1.4 billion in income from crypto last week; it was disclosed on June 30.

The post Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Wants to Save Crypto — But Trump Windfall Is a Political Obstacle appeared first on The Intercept.

Documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that technology from the Virginia-based startup Anomaly 6 has been used to assist the “Anomalous Health Incidents Cross Functional Team,” the Pentagon’s official Havana syndrome investigatory task force. That group studies a cluster of strange symptoms claimed by personnel from U.S. spy agencies, the State Department, and elsewhere in the federal government.

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In 2022, The Intercept revealed that Anomaly 6 had used a provocative demonstration of its surveillance prowess in a closed-door business pitch. The company, which purchases bulk cellular location data harvested from millions of unwitting smartphone users around the world, showed a potential customer that its data stores were so vast and accurate that it could pinpoint the movements of employees of both the CIA and NSA, tracking them as they commuted between their homes and their respective agencies headquarters. It was a remarkable demonstration of the advanced capabilities of private sector surveillance brokers, who lean on unscrupulous smartphone apps and advertisers that indiscriminately share and sell users’ location data.

For any military, the appeal of this technology is obvious, and the Pentagon has used commercial device tracking for years. Although Anomaly 6 previously marketed its wares by showing how it could spy on fellow Americans, the pitch also showed how the company could track a foreign adversary’s naval assets abroad, for example.

It’s not clear on what basis the U.S. Air Force Concepts, Development, and Management Office chose Anomaly 6 for its Havana syndrome investigation; federal records note the contract is worth nearly $6 million and set to run through September.

Anomaly 6 and the Air Force did not respond to a request for comment.

The Air Force redacted most of the document before releasing it to The Intercept, providing only fragments of information about how Anomaly 6 is help investigate “anomalous health incidents.” The contract, described in public procurement records as Project Yellowfin, notes that the Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team will make use of the company’s “expertise in location intelligence” to “identify actors and activities of interest,” and that the “Contractor shall produce data visualization products capable of being utilized as stand-alone brief materials by decision-makers and senior leaders. These products will enable briefers to highlight geographical distribution, temporal patterns, patterns of life, and interconnectivity of events and actors.”

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This reference to actors of interest may relate to the intensely held belief by Havana syndrome patients that their suffering is due to a covert energy-based attack by a foreign government. In its 2022 pitch, Anomaly 6 singled out its ability to track the movements of Chinese and Russian military personnel, both countries that have been implicated in hypothesized Havana syndrome schemes.

Last year, the U.S. intelligence community released a report that stated most of its constituent agencies believe it is highly unlikely the symptoms are the result of actions by a national adversary.

When asked if Anomaly 6 location data had been used to investigate this proposed nexus or contributed to the intelligence report, the Air Force did not respond. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the reorganization of the Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team, now a division of the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, helmed by former Uber executive Emil Michael. Michael’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Company That Bragged It Could Track U.S. Spies Hired to Investigate “Havana Syndrome” appeared first on The Intercept.

Aron D’Souza, the brainchild behind the lawsuit to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a “private AI tribunal” to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.

“Today, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,” the platform’s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza. 

“Due to feedback we’re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future,” Objection’s site, which features an uncanny AI-animated image of a painterly woman’s shifting eyes, now reads. “Stay tuned for updates.”

The platform itself was something of a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman. Among the claims it was adjudicating was whether Joe Rogan promoted the use of “horse dewormer” ivermectin as a Covid-19 cure and claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

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It’s deeply unclear how many everyday people need easy access to defamation remedies; the lawsuit that eventually killed Gawker was brought on behalf of the professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also one of the backers of Objection. But when I caught up with D’Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric. 

“I don’t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,” he told me. “My view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.”

When I asked why he shuttered the site, D’Souza pointed to sky-high demand.

“After launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),” he said. “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.”

When I first spoke with D’Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.

There isn’t much that D’Souza points out that isn’t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. “It’s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,” he said. The business model for most publishers “has completely fallen apart.” And “the people who are being written about,” he said, “aren’t very happy because they feel like they’re being represented incorrectly.”

On top of all of that, the editorial boards of the largest mainstream media outlets, owned by a handful of elite families, reflect their own biases — whether it’s the Sulzberger family, who owns the New York Times, or the Murdochs, the News Corp scions who own Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

“You walk into that building on 6th Avenue in New York and you feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch, as you’re aware. You walk into the Daily Mail building on Kensington High Street in London, you feel the presence of the Rothermere family. In a more subtle way, you walk into the New York Times building, and you feel the presence of the Sulzbergers,” D’Souza said.

According to him, that concentrated, elite media ownership class has contributed to a compounding, historic crisis that threatens the credibility of journalism as a whole. Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey, the lowest it’s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6–17 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats — 51 percent — say they trust traditional media. For all intents and purposes, D’Souza’s got much of the diagnosis right. It’s his solution that’s the problem. 

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The centerpiece of Objection is what the company calls its “Honor Index,” a rating system that purports to tell how credible a journalist is. Here’s how it works: For a fee of $2,500 to $5,000 (depending where on the website you looked), anyone can file an Objection. After that, your case is investigated by what the platform describes as “the most qualified researchers,” which it says include award-winning investigative journalists, former CIA and FBI agents, and military intelligence officers.

The resulting investigation purportedly identifies the factual claims that require investigating, and adjudicates evidence by its “proximity to the underlying event.” Primary sources, documents, court filings, emails, and transaction records are valued at the highest premium. Anonymous sources “lacking a traceable origin” rank lowest. Once the investigators have gathered their “evidence” and offered the journalist in question an opportunity to reply, a proprietary AI system makes a judgment on the quality of the claim. The goal, ostensibly, is greater transparency into the business of newsgathering.  

“The actual article you publish,” he told me, referring to this Intercept story, “will only include a very small percentage of the actual data that has been transmitted to you. We live in this world of infinite cloud storage, infinite AI comprehension capability. So why isn’t that underlying data available?”

On first blush, D’Souza’s critiques mostly track, but for the fact that much of what he is asking for is already standard practice in many newsrooms. Pick through the archives of the once formidable, now-defunct BuzzFeed News data investigations team and you’ll find the underlying code for the publication’s award-winning investigation into surveillance aircrafts used by the military and law enforcement agencies, among other stories. Most newsrooms that practice data journalism host GitHub pages where people can audit their code and datasets.

Anonymous sources, however, are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are, he said, “One of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.” By his reasoning, science doesn’t use anonymous sources and is subject to peer review, so why isn’t journalism held to the same standard of external oversight?

It doesn’t take much to realize that the power differential exists in much the opposite direction. Who’s more of a threat: a whistleblower speaking out about the dangers of some of the biggest companies in the world, or the powerful company with the $300 billion market cap sitting on some of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture in the world?

When Objection launched in April, and up until after our conversation, D’Souza said the company had seeded a list of active cases it was working on adjudicating. One case under active “investigation” before the site went dark was “The Public v. Hannah Broughton,” over the statement made in the U.K.-based outlet The Mirror that “Amazon workers were forced to work around a dead colleague and told ‘don’t look.’” However, Broughton wasn’t the originator of that claim; it was originally made by the investigative journalism outlet The Western Edge. The Mirror had merely aggregated the publication’s reporting and sourced it to the original reporter.

When I asked D’Souza about the claim and why, while it was under investigation, the company decided to reach out to the aggregator, he responded, “Repetition is not a defense to defamation in law.” Publications are generally liable for republishing defamatory content. But scrutinize that investigation further, and among the evidence listed is other stories, including by People magazine, that also aggregated The Western Edge — but not the actual Western Edge story.

But the real irony is that the person investigating that claim for Objection is listed as an “anonymous investigator.” When asked about fighting anonymity with more anonymity, D’Souza again gestured to the “power imbalance to be reckoned with.” While the case is being investigated, he said, Objection doesn’t want to “disclose the name of the investigator because a rich and powerful individual might say, oh, ‘I’m going to go bribe that investigator.’” The investigator’s name, he said, would be published when the investigation concludes. 

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It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in “fixing” journalism — especially considering that D’Souza described in an editor’s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a “natural extension” of his and Thiel’s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker’s undoing would fare through Objection’s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.

Objection’s AI arbitration system, in which both the aggrieved figure and the journalist would need to agree to, also seems to have a fatal flaw. In promoting the use of AI judges, D’Souza cites a paper by two University of Chicago legal scholars that suggests AI adjudicators apply the law more consistently than human judges. In one test case, AI cited judicial precedent 99 percent of the time in its decision-making versus 61 percent for human judges. But that paper also critiques that level of accuracy. The paper’s authors write, “Another possibility is that GPT is actually a better judge than humans are. While many readers have argued that this is the proper reading of our results, we believe that this theory is decisively contradicted by the fact that GPT made decisions like law students.”

Real judges, the authors say, don’t make decisions in a legal vacuum but also through the broader human context of their decisions. Asked about that conclusion, D’Souza questioned whether “the goals of the law” should be more “interpretive” or more by “the letter of the law.”

“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man,” he said. “I firmly believe that we should be reducing human bias.”

But that area of human judgment is also arguably how the legal profession moves the law forward and how unjust laws are overturned. The seeds of this country’s freedom of the press law were laid when a jury defied the British crown’s judges and refused to convict the publisher of a small New York printing press of libel for publishing material that offended the then-governor of the state. Jurors would nullify the convictions of those who helped fugitive slaves flee violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the 1970s, when the Camden 28 were tried for breaking into their local draft board offices and destroying their draft cards, the jury again acquitted the group based on their moral conviction. It’s hard to imagine that AI, trained on the letter of the law as it’s written, could easily navigate the murky moral waters that those laws may produce.

“Human judges are able to depart from rules when following them would produce bad outcomes from a moral, social, or policy standpoint,” the paper’s authors write. 

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A more basic mark against the AI arbiter the paper’s authors point out is fundamental to how these systems work — or don’t: “No one understands how they make decisions, and some people speculate that their decisions are literally unintelligible for humans.”

D’Souza is asking a question as old as the oldest democracy: Who watches the watchmen? 

One doesn’t have to look farther than the appalling double standard the mainstream press has applied to its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to see the relevance of that question. But in a world where American press freedom is already backsliding in favor of the wealthiest, it’s hard to see how a black-box AI “fact-checker” backed by the billionaire owner of one of the world’s biggest military tech company is a better solution than a well-funded public media ecosystem buttressed by press freedom laws that are designed to hold the most powerful among us accountable.

The post The Peter Thiel Ally Who Helped Kill Gawker Wanted to Save Journalism. Then His Site Went Dark. appeared first on The Intercept.